


The Fault Line

by imperialhuxness



Category: BlacKkKlansman (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Kitchen (2019)
Genre: (sort of), Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Flip Is Very Lonely, Frottage, Gabriel Done Fucked Up, Getting Back Together, Hard Zimmalley should be a tag, I can't believe canon set me up for this, M/M, Post-Canon, Sad with a Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 09:21:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20171896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperialhuxness/pseuds/imperialhuxness
Summary: Flip looks him up and down, full lips pursed, wordless, appraising. Face shuttered. Like an insurance man at the site of a fatal crash.Finally, he meets Gabriel’s eyes.“Give me one good reason not to shut this door.”. .Gabriel goes back west.





	The Fault Line

**Author's Note:**

> So uh, I saw The Kitchen, then stayed up all night writing this. (As such, this contains heavy spoilers.) These two got me good, folks.
> 
> Additional Content Warnings: This fic references canon-typical violence and Gabriel's PTSD.

It’s damn near two thousand miles from LaGuardia to 31st Street. Two mountain ranges. A whole fucking bloodstream of rivers. Wheat. Corn. Everything on stalks looks the same from 30,000 feet.   
  
Gabriel knows this. Has known it. 

He knows that it’s a thirty minute cab ride to the Departures terminal at Colorado Springs Airport with morning traffic. 

Knows the way your fingers tap your kneecap, and your leg keeps bouncing. The window next to your head is fogging up with your own breath, and you’re muttering, “_Faster, motherfucker,_” at the driver and at the red lights, because you’ve got to get the fuck to New York before some other jackass gets his hands on her.

It’s an entirely different route, though, at 11:00 PM, from Arrivals, when the jackass was you all along. 

The driver keeps ratcheting up the defroster, and with it the radio volume. Gabriel breathes in through his nose until the glass clears, splays his fingers across his pants-leg.

The driver turns down the Doobie Brothers; his eyes flash in the rearview mirror.

“Heading home?” 

Gabriel snorts. “I wish.”

(Even a year ago, he wouldn’t have said yes. Couldn’t have.)

“No hotels on 31st. You got the address right?”

“I know the damn address.”

The driver shrugs. Dials up the music. His headlights slice two yellow incisions in the mountain fog. 

_I’ve done things _

_I'd like to undo_

_Now, darling, it’s you--_

Modest houses roll by on either side, just sallow smudges of porchlight through the mist. Gabriel curls and uncurls his fingers on his knee, rubs his palm up his thigh. His hands are sweaty. 

Gabriel doesn’t _get _clammy. He’d be dead if he got clammy. Would have had his guts shredded somewhere west of Saigon, if he got clammy. Certainly would have had no place in the Kitchen again, once he came back with ghosts in the corners of his eyes. 

He can separate physical responses from emotional ones. Emotional ones, from kinetic ones. (Usually.) 

(Except, apparently, for where certain people are concerned)

(Two, to be exact.)

He’d have done anything for Claire. Had already given up half his world, just by going back. (Not that he appreciated it at the time.)

Shacking up with one’s informant apparently puts a strain on detective and source alike.

Flip had been growing more distant. This was never an arrangement that could have lasted. It’s fine to sleep with the enemy, but once it--once _he_\--starts to matter, somebody has to change sides. 

They’d fought. 

Of course they had.

Just as Gabriel had made his way into Flip’s personal space--hoping, in the back of his mind, that a blowjob would defer this to a later date--Flip’s entire face had gone cold.

One moment, voice rising, eyes flashing. The next, nothing.

Like a man freshly dead. The second you see the life leave him, the blood start to blossom across starched linen.

Like when he debriefs anyone but Gabriel.

His tongue had gone to the corner of his mouth, and he’d looked down. He’d popped his lips, then looked back up. Said, like he was reading a teleprompter strapped to Gabriel’s forehead, “_We have a meeting on the books for tomorrow morning.” _(Nine-thirty at the Dine-and-Dash. Gabriel knew this.) _“I’ll be at the station until then.”_

Gabriel had paced the living room until the phone rang at half-past one. Ruby. Claire had needed him.

(_Ruby_ had needed him, a blood-spattered rung on her ladder to the top.)

Claire had needed a cop, a lifeline, a spot at the Goddamn women’s shelter. Anything but someone who would sell her the ancient malaphor that he who lives by the sword shall not perish but have eternal life. 

(Her blood had been so warm on his hands, her body so limp. Everything he knows, everything he taught her, and he still couldn’t--)

“Mister?”

The cab has stopped. The driver’s idling in front of a cracked asphalt driveway. A few yards up it, the porchlight flickers. Damn near a year, and he still hasn’t fixed it. (Damn near a year, and it’s still somehow not out yet.)

The radio blares clear over the thrum of the motor:

_Shadow dancing, all this and nothing more--_

Gabriel glances at the meter, pulls a few crumpled bills out of his pocket, and leans over the console to press them into the driver’s hand. 

He mutters his thanks and grabs his backpack off the seat next to him. He left almost everything in their apartment. (The revolver went into the river and out to sea.)

He hardly hears the car door slam shut behind him, the tires skid off into the glare of the nearest streetlight. He stands alone at the foot of the driveway. Flip’s Ford is backed in, the pickup’s dead headlights catching a bit of the porch light, refracting it orange back at Gabriel.

Nothing about the house is intimidating. (Not that Gabriel _gets _intimidated in the first place, but still.) It’s a single-storey brick affair built sometime in the 50s, from the same blueprint as every other place on the block. 

Gabriel asked Flip once why he didn’t have an apartment, live closer to work, to the pulse of the city. Like normal attractive single people do. He said he liked the privacy, the quiet. _“You understand that_,” he said. Not a question.

The house definitely looks quiet in this light. And desolate and empty and cold. The porch light winks. It’s half past fucking eleven. Flip is in bed, or close to it. He’ll have to be at the station sometime between seven and eight tomorrow.

He won’t want this. Made it clear he didn’t, even before Gabriel left with no warning, off to chase the nearest possible warm embrace. Even if it was two thousand miles away.

Gabriel bites his lip, runs a hand through his hair. It’s lank from nearly a day of travel, not to mention the six empty weeks in New York before he’d said _fuck it _and-- 

And come crawling back to the good man he abandoned to go ruin a good woman by convincing her she was invincible.

(What the fuck is he doing here?)

Flip doesn’t want what they had. Flip doesn’t want--

But.

He inhales, puts his hands at his sides. Deliberately uncurls his fingers.

What they had isn’t what he’s here to offer.

He’s nearly a year out of the local mob scene--he doesn’t have any fresh intelligence to barter. (He could get some, though, with time, if Flip will just--) 

But what he does have, at the moment, is his lips and his ass and the knowledge that Flip gets hard when you run your tongue along the shell of his ear. (And that he takes his coffee black with one sugar, and prefers vanilla anything over chocolate, but that part won’t get Gabriel a roof over his head tonight.)

What’s the worst he’ll do, call the cops?

That would at least score Gabriel a second chance in the morning.

_Confidence. _

He told Claire that’s what it takes to pull the trigger. 

It’s also what it takes to take the first step toward the F-350, and the next, and the next, until he’s made a left onto the little concrete footpath and is crunching over dead leaves up to the doorstep.

He stops on the threshold, puts his hand to the aluminum doorbell buzzer. The porchlight hums and sputters overhead. He inhales and goes in for the kill presses down. From here, the chime resonates only faintly. 

Gabriel holds his breath for far longer than the bullet should take to hit home. At first, there’s no sign. He doesn’t dare ring again, not yet.

_This is so pathetic, this is so fucking pathetic-- _

There’s a twenty-four hour diner four blocks up the street. He could go. Camp out for the night with as many pots of coffee as will last him till the city wakes up, and he can formulate a new and less humiliating plan. Maybe do some pickpocketing to score cash for a night at a motel. (Pathetic.)

He should just--

A light blinks on in the back of the house. (In the bedroom.)

It isn’t like the anxious knot in the pit of Gabriel’s stomach has dissipated once in the past six weeks, but it’s all the more noticeable now, with his heart climbing into his throat. (Killing a man is easy; groveling in front of one is another story.)

The house lights up in slow motion, a dull yellow glow growing brighter behind the front window’s closed blinds. The bar lock slides open with a gentle tap. The deadbolt clicks open, then the standard lock, then the doorknob is turning, and the world is ending, and--

Flip Zimmerman is standing eighteen inches from Gabriel, in an undershirt Gabriel might have once been able to call a wifebeater, one hand dropping the doorknob, the other gripping a revolver. Smith & Wesson, by the look of it. Uncocked, but Gabriel knows it’s fully loaded.

Gabriel spreads his hands, though he knows he’s safe.

Flip looks him up and down, full lips pursed inward, wordless, appraising. Face shuttered. Like an insurance man at the site of a fatal crash.

Finally, he meets Gabriel’s eyes.

“Give me one good reason not to shut this door.”

_It has to be good? _dies on his tongue. Flip always brings that out of him--the snark. They bring it out of each other. Used to, anyway.

“I don’t--” He clears his throat, and every intriguing line he’d meant to lead with evaporates from his brain. “I don’t have one, I--”

“Who’s after you?” Flip asks. 

He has the most intense eyes. There’s usually something comforting about the depth of them. (They’d damn near pinned him to the chair at the first debriefing--damn near kept him upright, off his knees, and above the table.) Now, though, they simply reflect the chemical porch light, looking darker than they should.

“No one,” Gabriel says. “Except me, maybe.”

Flip combs a thick-fingered hand through his hair, as if he somehow knows his hands have been haunting Gabriel’s dreams.

“Except you,” he echoes. “Congratulations on your newfound capacity for remorse, then.”

It would be the appropriate moment to close the door, but he doesn’t. Just keeps staring, taking Gabriel’s face in. Reading him.

“Flip, I’m--” Gabriel starts.

“Do I want to know the body count?”

It’s a low fucking blow, but Gabriel deserves it. And then some.

But his eyes sting suddenly at it anyway, hand goes to his mouth. (Claire’s blood was so _warm_, and he might as well have pulled the trigger.)

“Jesus,” Flip says. Sighs, really. “And I guess you thought this would be the only welcoming door on the face of the earth.”

“I didn’t think you’d be _welcoming_, I just--” _You were the only other person I’ve met who felt even halfway real to me, you’re perfect, you’re constant, I can’t lose-- _“Hoped that maybe we could find a new arrangement.” 

“Not likely,” Flip says, but there’s hesitance in his voice, the ghost of that old loneliness. (Gabriel’s ticket.)

His eyes are still too shadowed to betray any emotion, but his Adam’s apple works as he swallows. His lips thin again. Then he steps aside, nods Gabriel’s way in.

Gabriel can’t manage to thank him.

#

Within minutes Gabriel’s seated on the same brown sofa that he came on more times than he can count. Even with Flip across the room, he can feel the phantom pain of Flip’s lips on his, the press of his body on top of him, covering him. Holding him down. His elbows tingle where he burned them on the unforgiving upholstery.

As soon as he crossed the doorstep, Flip told him he could sit in here, then he wandered into the kitchen and returned with one beer, uncapped, and sat down in the leather armchair Gabriel rode him into last year. He takes a long sip from it, sets it on the sidetable. 

He’s in sweatpants below the undershirt. Nothing beneath the sweatpants, as far as Gabriel catalogues.

“Were you seriously gonna make me ask for the story?” Flip says, after an infinitely long minute.

Gabriel offers him a weak smile. “That _was_ how we used to do things.”

“Yeah, before you tore up our. Arrangement.”

“Huge fucking mistake.”

“Inevitable.” Flip shrugs. “Hadn’t we just figured that out?”

They had. Flip had said _if you w_o_n’t change for this, then what will you change for, _and Gabriel had said _how can you expect me to be anything but what I am. _(He hadn’t prefaced it with _if you love me_, but he’d meant it.)

He works his fingers into the armrest, into the rough upholstery. He pops his lips.

“And then I ran away to something easier.”

Flip downs another swig of beer. The bottle clinks as he sets it back down. “I hope that scratched your itch.”

Gabriel would be lying if he said Claire hadn’t. Hadn’t filled some gaping void inside him. After a while, though, it had become as much her as the rest of the game. 

He had missed that, too, the rush of the kill, the _method _of it all. Tidy little compartments for every stage of every hit. And sharing it with someone beautiful who looked at him like he was Jesus Christ and Sir Lancelot all at once, well-- It scratched something, alright.

“For a while,” he says.

“Until you fucked it up.”

“As I do.”

Flip scoffs. “As you do.”

The silence stretches between them again, and Flip goes back to his beer. 

Gabriel studies the room--his defenses automatically go down in here, as much as he’s hardwired for minute observation everywhere else. Damn near a year, and this cop’s place is still labeled _safe _somewhere in Gabriel’s scrambled brain.

Nothing has changed. There’s the blank TV--all 24 football-friendly inches of it; the two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves--mostly nonfiction. The record player on its stand between them, library of 45s underneath; the coffee table between the couch and Flip’s armchair. Two table lamps cast the room in warm yellow light.

“How have things been around here?” Gabriel asks, at the same time that Flip says, “What happened to her?”

The girl from the letter, Flip means. (Gabriel _had _written, about a month later. Kept it vague, tried to explain. He hadn’t expected a response, and hadn’t received one.)

“Who said something happened to her?” he snaps back, a stone sinking to the pit of his stomach.

“I mean, you reacted pretty strongly to the words _body count_. It would have to be her, that did that, since--” Flip stops abruptly, clears his throat. “Since she clearly meant a lot to you.”

(Her blood sticky on his fingers, the dead weight of her in his arms, her eyes fast shut. The wound was to the back of the head. She could have been sleeping. She wasn’t.)

“I should have left her alone.” 

(Or at least gotten the hell out of her life, after the alley. Corrected her, when he’d become her idol.)

Flip looks at him over the lip of his beer bottle, probing. Like he sees him for exactly what he is. Certainly no more than that.

“Maybe she’s not the only one.”

The stone in the pit of Gabriel’s stomach shatters into shrapnel.

“Then why don’t you just kick me out?”

Flip leans back, and his face should be closed off, icy, but it isn’t. 

Gabriel can read everything he saw at the first debriefing, the one that ended with his lips around Flip’s impressive dick and a new and convenient intelligence swapping relationship. (Spit and come swapping too, which was the fun part.) 

Gabriel can read it: the loneliness that comes with hiding two integral parts of yourself, the nights spent jerking off to nothing in the shower, sweaty hands and tobacco breath in dark corners of a bar he’d lose his job for being caught in. Faceless men in booths and bathrooms.

Nothing like enough.

“You tell me,” Flip says. 

And Gabriel knows. Has known. “I have what you need.”

Flip’s mouth tightens into a mirthless smile. “You don’t have any intel.”

“You don’t need intel.”

Gabriel stands, takes one hesitant step around the coffee table.

“I need to protect myself,” Flip counters. “Whatever you-- you did to me, it was…” He trails off, stiffening. “I didn’t need that.”

Gabriel takes another step forward, then another. He’s at the foot of Flip’s chair, looking down at him. It’s an angle he rarely used to get. He bends to adjust to it, putting a hand on each armrest. Not touching Flip--not holding him down--but enough to bring them nose to nose. (To bring all of Flip’s beauty marks into breathtaking focus.)

“I compromised you,” Gabriel says, and manages to keep out any sultriness. It isn’t sexy, at least not to Flip. It’s just a fact. (Flip likes facts.)

“That--” Flip’s breath hitches, and he holds Gabriel’s gaze. Wets his lips. “--that never happens. I don’t do that. I always--”

“--keep work completely walled off from your personal life,” Gabriel supplies, letting his voice drop to a murmur. He knows the spiel. The resistance he plowed down time and again. He twists his lips. “I should have tried that in New York.”

“You didn’t go to New York for work. You had work right here.”

“I had _you _right here.” Gabriel purses his lips. “Until I didn’t.”

“You could have--” Flip has these stupid fucking doe eyes that always look a little wet. They aren’t any more so than usual right now, but they still cut between Gabriel’s ribs. “--if you’d just--”

Gabriel leans forward, crushes his lips against Flip’s, more to stem the flow of bullshit than out of any real appropriateness. He sinks into it immediately, though. The startled sound Flip makes into his mouth lights up some forgotten pathway in his brain, goes straight to his cock, and ups the urgency of all of this.

Flip’s mouth--for all his typical resistance--is pliable under Gabriel’s, plush lips chasing Gabriel’s own at even the slightest withdrawal. One of his hands cups the nape of Gabriel’s neck, the other slides to his waist, pulling him down into his lap, hardly breaking the kiss to do so.

The stubble of Flip’s goatee scrapes against Gabriel’s own several-day shadow, and the friction is-- The friction of that alone is something, not to mention the way Flip’s hips buck gently up toward him, as if involuntarily. 

Gabriel pulls back for a moment when he’s running out of breath, and Flip’s lips part. His chest--solid as ever against Gabriel’s--is heaving, his pupils blown wide with _want_.

“You haven’t had anyone,” Gabriel observes, “since I went away. Not even once.”

Flip flushes at that, but levels out his voice to minimum hoarseness. “That’s none of your concern.” His lips brush Gabriel’s with the last word.

“I’m--” _Flattered, _Gabriel would normally say. He can’t, though, now. “--sorry,” he finishes instead.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Flip murmurs, and resumes the kiss, this time with teeth, teasing at Gabriel’s lower lip, not hard enough to draw blood (for all Gabriel deserves it), but definitely hard enough to bruise and swell. 

Gabriel lets him take what he wants. He can have it, have all of it, Gabriel needs--

The hardening line of Flip’s cock presses into his thigh, and _oh. _

Oh, fuck yes. 

Gabriel grinds down, earning a moan. He takes the opportunity to pull back. Comb his fingers through Flip’s hair and tuck it behind his ear.

“What are you--” Flip starts.

“I’m sorry,” Gabriel says, precisely because Flip doesn’t want to hear it. “I’m sorry.” He nips lightly at the shell of Flip’s ear. Runs his tongue along the edge of it. Flip shudders in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and starts down his neck.

“Stop saying that.” Flip’s voice is taut.

Gabriel hovers at the juncture of Flip’s neck and collarbone. Breathes against Flip’s skin, “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t kn--”

Gabriel cuts him off with another kiss, Flip’s breath hitching in his throat. No teeth, but deeper now. Flip could say, if he didn’t want a mark.

“I missed you,” Gabriel says, when he draws back. “I missed you.”

Flip snorts. “You bastard.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You’d better.”

Gabriel bends to press another kiss to the meat of Flip’s shoulder, the end of his collarbone. He’s beautiful. Gabriel’s not just saying that, about missing him. He’s not just here because this is the only place he has to go.

His own cock his warming, filling. He rolls his hips forward to make sure Flip feels it.

Flip does. Hisses _fuck _under his breath.

Gabriel meets his eyes. “Do you want me to blow you?” 

An unreadable flicker passes through Flip’s gaze, before coalescing into something like hunger. “I’d rather just fuck you.”

“Holy shit.”

Better than Gabriel ever expected. He was going to service tonight, not--

“Is that okay?” Flip prompts.

“Fuck yeah.”

#

Flip’s bedroom triggers as few of Gabriel’s defense mechanisms as his living room. Possibly even fewer. Everything about it is vividly familiar, even and especially from his hands and knees.

The vague, musty impression of his cologne on the air; the telltale bachelor’s pillows: one well-loved and flat, the other in all but mint condition (slightly dilapidated now, after Gabriel’s use); these sheets. They’d ruined so many of Flip’s ratty old ones that they’d had to buy new. Gabriel had. His treat, with laundered money.

But more than that: the warm slickness of lube, the unbearably tight fit of two of Flip’s fingers inside him, stretching him full. He tastes blood in his effort not to cry out. He’ll let Flip have that victory eventually, but he can at least save it for his cock.

As one of Flip’s fingers strikes his prostate, the gray sheets between his hands dissolve into pinpoints of light. He can think of nothing else--for the moment--but the rush of it. Sheer pleasure singing through every part of him, whiting out New York, whiting out the revolver and the blood and the one corpse that mattered, whiting out the two thousand miles it took to bring him back here.

This is all that matters. (He doesn’t deserve this.)

“Fuck, Flip,” he hisses. “Make it hurt, damnit.”

“I intend to.”

The darkness in his tone sends lightning up and down Gabriel’s spine. “Please.”

Flip pulls out without a word, and Gabriel’s body bucks instinctively toward him, rejecting the emptiness. Humiliating, his own body, but he _needs--_

“Flip, I--” he starts.

“I _know_,” Flip returns, but there’s no tenderness in it. They both know Gabriel’s in no position to ask for anything. Lube squelches against the bottle, against Flip’s cock. 

Gabriel can feel the warmth from Flip’s groin as he lines himself up against his cleft, but he presses in with no warning.

Gabriel does cry out at that--an inane sound from the back of his throat, an involuntary response to the sting of it, the stretch, the sheer _size _of him. As Flip bottoms out, there’s a moment of it: that euphoric fullness, before Flip starts to move.

Flip’s out of practice, so it takes him a few glorious, fumbling, aching thrusts to find Gabriel’s prostate again, and his own rhythm. Once he does, though, it’s amazing. That whited out feeling, that haze where nothing else matters but the man inside of him.

Were this anyone else, any_time _else, he might ask to be told what he is, called what he deserves, but this is _Flip_, so he isn’t sure he can even form a complete sentence, much less ask for something Flip had never seemed comfortable with in the past.

Gabriel lets go, loses himself in the pace of it, the burn and slide, Flip’s murmurings that _you’re so fucking tight_, that _fuck, you feel good_, that _fuck_, _you did miss this. _At some point, Flip’s right hand briefly cups Gabriel’s balls, then wraps around his straining cock, gives it a few rough strokes as he says he’s close.

“Gabriel, I’m--” he starts again, and he pumps Gabriel’s cock again as his spend fills him, runs between Gabriel’s legs and onto the new-ish sheets. Gabriel digs his fingers into them against his own climax, then he’s striping his own stomach, come dripping onto them.

Once Flip pulls out, Gabriel rolls over. Straight into the mess. He hardly cares. (He’s busy rubbing at his eyes.)

#

Forty-five minutes, a shower, and a second orgasm later, Gabriel is wrapped around Flip on top of the comforter, a spare flatsheet pulled on top of them. Flip’s hair is still damp, and Gabriel could get high on the smell of it.

Some of the city light trickles in between the curtains, but nothing like New York. It’s so quiet here. If they went outside, there’d be constellations.

As it is, Gabriel runs a hand over the contours of Flip’s chest.

“I should still have some contacts around here,” he says. Offers. “It’ll take a week or so to catch up with all of them, but--”

Flip doesn’t flinch, shows no sign at all. His voice is flat, standard debriefing. “I’ve been fine without them.” 

“I know,” Gabriel returns. “I just--I know I ought to offer you something.”

“You already have.”

“Yeah, but--”

“This doesn’t fix anything,” Flip says, but the pillow muffles some of his tone’s edge. “Everything I said in the spring, I still mean it.”

Everything he said.

That this can never work while the law lies between them. That Gabriel as he is is not fit for long-term consumption, that he’s dangerous and untrustworthy and _selfish_. Gabriel had argued then. He can’t now. 

(Not with the bullet in Claire’s dead skull, not with his revolver somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson. Not with the lonely hurt in Flip’s eyes.)

Gabriel swallows, presses a kiss to Flip’s shoulder. Which is unfair, he knows, but hell, he’s a work in progress.

“I can try,” he says. “Is that anything like enough?”

Flip is silent for a long moment. His chest rises and falls under Gabriel’s hand. He could be sleeping. (He isn’t.)

“I’ll decide in the morning,” he murmurs.

“Okay.” Gabriel presses the tip of his nose into Flip’s neck. “I’m not going anywhere.”

**Author's Note:**

> Credit to The Doobie Brothers for the title and lyrics quoted, and to Andy Gigg for lyrics.
> 
> Find me on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/imperialhuxness)


End file.
